The Role of the State

The implementation of central bank digital currencies as the primary medium of exchange would exacerbate the flaws of our current fiat system which encourage banks to overextend credit and create liabilities that they cannot redeem. This will worsen the already recurring cycles of financial crises, writes Vibhu Vikramaditya.

A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their inception in...

While the development of artificial intelligence has led to efficient business strategies, such as dynamic pricing, this new technology is vulnerable to collusion and consumer harm when companies share the same software through a central platform. Gabriele Bortolotti highlights the importance of antitrust enforcement in this domain for the second article in our series, using as a case study the RealPage class action lawsuit in the Seattle housing market.

In response to both Herb Hovenkamp’s February 27 article in ProMarket and, perhaps more importantly, also to Hovenkamp’s highly regarded treatise, Lawrence B. Landman, first, shows that the Future Markets Model explains the court’s decision in Meta/Within. Since Meta was not even trying to make a future product, the court correctly found that Meta would not enter the Future Market. Second, the Future Markets Model is the analytical tool which Hovenkamp says the enforcers lack when they try to protect competition to innovate.

Darren Bush, Mark Glick, and Gabriel A. Lozada argue that the Consumer Welfare Standard  is inconsistent with modern welfare economics and that a modern approach to antitrust could integrate traditional Congressional goals as advocated by the Neo-Brandesians. Such an approach could be the basis for an alliance between the post-Chicago economists and the Neo-Brandesians.

This year’s Stigler Center conference on antitrust and competition invited scholars to propose alternatives to the consumer welfare standard.

Antonio Capobianco, the deputy head of the OECD Competition Division and one of the authors of the 2023 OECD report on algorithmic competition and collusion, explains the risks that algorithms and artificial intelligence pose to competition and how regulators can approach the changing competition paradigm.

An exit-inducing vertical merger might reduce welfare even if it is a welfare-enhancing vertical merger absent exit. Therefore, the possibility for rivals’ exit should be incorporated into the guidelines for vertical merger evaluation, write Javier D. Donna and Pedro Pereira in new research.

Tim Wu responds to a recent ProMarket post by Herbert Hovenkamp which argues for the dismissal of the Supreme Court’s 1962 Brown Shoe decision. Wu says that the Court’s duty is to obey and interpret the intentions of laws set by Congress, and cases cannot be dismissed because they don’t align with a particular policy perspective.

In their research, published in History of Economic Ideas, Thierry Kirat and Frédéric Marty stress the importance of the late 1930s in the making of antitrust. The moment was exceptional for its consensus within the economic discipline and the implementation of voluntarist public enforcement, particularly under Thurman Arnold according to the prescriptions of the Second Chicago School, institutionalists, and the preferences of the Neo-Brandeis movement.